Saturday, 17 November 2012

Top Ten Costs of the BP Oil Spill that won't be Covered by the $4.5 Billion Fine

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BP recently agreed to pay a fine of some $4.5 billion dollars from the US
Department of Justice for malfeasance in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill,
the largest fine paid in US history. There are also manslaughter and
obstruction of justice charges against individual executives.

BP also was forced by President Obama to pay out $20 billion for damage
claims, though it has dragged its feet in actually making the payments. It
faces further lawsuits and private payouts.

Given the high price of petroleum, however, BP can pay the fine with no
difficulty (it is allowed to pay it over five years, or less than $1 billion a
year. The company’s profits in 2011 were
$40 billion. The fine was so slight that BP stock rose slightly on the
news.

Meanwhile the actual damage that the oil spill did to the environment was
almost certainly tens of billions more than any payouts BP has been forced to
engage in. Not only is the monetary damage, in harm to fishing and tourism,
substantial, but the damage to quality of life and to marine life and fisheries
is unacceptably high.

All this before we even get to the point that BP’s oil sales are causing
tons and tons of carbon dioxide to be dumped into the atmosphere, accelerating
destructive climate change.

Here are some of the real costs of the oil spill, which typically won’t be
mentioned in the MSM, and which dwarf in their cost a mere $4.5 billion fine.:

1. Fish
with lesions and oozing sores. Dr. Jim Cowan: “The fishermen have never
seen anything like this… And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at
somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this
either.”